


Conversations

by harper_m



Category: Friday Night Lights
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-09
Updated: 2009-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-31 02:05:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harper_m/pseuds/harper_m
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim, Lyla, and Jason in Mexico. Lyla's not sure what to do with what she's feeling, and God's got nothing to say on the matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the 2nd season ep where they go to Mexico.

Lyla liked to pretend it was all a hazy memory, something that might be half-real or all made up. When that didn’t work, she liked to tell herself that it didn’t count, because they were all caught up between emotions they couldn’t handle and enough alcohol to leave even Riggins kind of drunk. Or maybe it was like one of those movie things, where people who’d stepped a little too close to death rushed recklessly into something that reaffirmed life and, according to popular opinion, there was nothing more life-affirming than sex.

Because later it seemed like it couldn’t have been that she’d been in a place and at a time where three people loved each other enough that it made sense.

******

She’d tried to do what she’d said she was going to do when she’d left Jason and Tim on the dance floor at the tiny excuse for a bar just across from their motel. She’d gone back to her room and dropped down onto her knees, hands fisted together under her chin and pressed close to her heart. She’d closed her eyes, turned her face up to heaven, took a deep breath, and tried to pray. She’d thanked God that Jason hadn’t drowned and offered up some gratitude that He’d used her as His tool in His great, grand plan to keep her best friend and former love of her life from flatlining on a table in the middle of Mexico while a shady carpetbagging surgeon ran the other way with his pile of cash, but after that, her mind went blank. She left God hanging, waiting on a finish she just couldn’t seem to find. It wasn’t the structure of the thing; she knew the words and the routines, had developed a mantra with which she ended all of her prayers – offers of love and pleas for the protection and well-being of her loved ones – but the way she understood it, praying didn’t come out of routine. Praying meant having a conversation with God, not running through a checklist of platitudes, and the truth was that she’d run out of things to say.

When she heard the soft knock at her door, she closed her eyes even tighter and told herself, in a new kind of mantra – _Don’t do it. Don’t open the door. Don’t do it. Don’t open the door._

“Lyla, come on. We just want to talk. Let us in.”

Tim’s voice was muffled but distinctive, and she could picture the pair of them easily. Tim would be standing there with one hand pressed up against the door frame, head hanging forward and hair falling to shadow his face. Jason would be just behind him, looking up – always looking up – with hope and contrition caught up in the small, slightly quirked smile he’d flash her way. She knew it like a fact, knew if she opened up the door, that’s how they’d be, and she’d stand firm for a minute, trying to push them away with the power of her glare, but she’d never had much success in the face of Tim’s sly smile and Jason’s beautifully innocent one.

So she concentrated harder, cranked up the volume on her new found mantra, and tried to stand firm. _Don’t do it. Don’t open the door. Don’t do it. Don’t open the door._

Jason’s voice echoed softly through the wood, an almost haunting, “Lyla, please.”

After that, though she didn’t want to admit it, it was pretty much over. And so she pretended like she didn’t have any control over herself, that her feet weren’t shuffling against the worn carpet of the shabby motel room. She pretended like her hand wasn’t on the doorknob, tightening, the muscles in her arm starting to burn as she fought between the part of her that knew what was good and the part of her that knew what was right.

There was a faint scratching, like the tableau she imagined on the other side of the door was on the verge of cracking, maybe falling away into nothing, and she moved with a jolt, jerking the door open almost violently. It was dark on the other side. There was a hint of light from a dim, nearly burned out bulb about 50 yards back and a splash of garish color from the colored lights strung round the ramshackle bar where this had all started. Through the crack she’d created, she saw the subtle pleading in Tim’s eyes matched with the same expression in Jason’s, and there was a moment when her heart seized and her chest ached and she felt the certainty of what would happen if she pulled the door the rest of the way open and let them inside.

“Lyla…”

She shook her head, cut off whatever Tim had been planning on saying, and slowly swung the door open wide.

It was nearly as dark inside the room as it was outside of it. She’d turned on the light in the bathroom but pushed the door nearly closed, not sure she really wanted to inspect the contents of the room that closely. That left the three of them thrown in shadows, scattered around the room like points of an unbalanced triangle from geometry class, the kind where, any way you looked, only two sides had been solved.

Lyla wasn’t yet sure whether they should talk or whether they shouldn’t. Since she’d let them in, the temperature in the room had shot up. It was hovering somewhere around scalding; sweat trickled down the indentation of her spine and down her cheek, just in front of her ear, in a way that reminded her of childhood and playing under the heat of the sun in the middle of the day.

She wished things could be as clear and easy now as they had been then.

The tension built until it was destined to crack, but Lyla figured she’d already done her part and stubbornly resisted doing any more. If they were going to move forward, to talk or cry or just have another beer in quiet celebration that disaster had been narrowly averted and truths had finally been faced, then the boys were going to have to take some responsibility, because she was through with it.

Left to the two of them, it was inevitable that Jason was the first one to move, wheeling across the room so that he was just in front of her. He took her hand between both of his, gentle as always, with that stupid, lopsided smile on his face that had always given her trouble.

“Lyla…” he began, but a shake of her head cut him off just like it had Tim.

She was tired of conversations. She’d run out of things to say.

When Tim’s arms wrapped around her from behind in a reverse bear hug, she wasn’t surprised. It kind of felt like something that had always been supposed to happen, the three of them bumping back and forth against one another until they got the path just right, until they made a circle that never had a start and never had a finish. When they brought everything into position, on the verge of finally locking the intangibles into place, there was a moment of pause. Lyla felt it deep in her gut, the sensation that something was going to happen as soon as everyone moved that last millimeter so that they were finally in perfect alignment, as soon as the trigger was flipped to send them all crashing into motion.

She figured that was why Tim’s lips found her neck at the same moment that Jason’s cheek pressed against her belly and her hand slid into his hair. They all kind of flipped at the same time, which meant that Jason’s knuckles were tracing up and down the outsides of her thighs and Tim’s arms felt like they were about to crush her even as he placed gentle kisses up and down from her collarbone to her jaw and she wasn’t going to stop them.

Her little white cotton dress was wet with sweat. It was sticking to her skin and constricting her movements, but she couldn’t find the words to tell them to take it off of her. A moment later and she forgot; Jason’s fingers hooked around the waistband of her panties and began to pull them down and Tim gathered the material of her skirt in one hand and rucked it up. She felt cool air on her front and the rough scrape of Tim’s jeans and the hard poke of his belt buckle against her back. Tim’s free hand found one of her breasts and Jason’s tongue began licking the sweat off her abdomen and Lyla thought but didn’t say a plaintive, lust-filled “ _God”_ that left her cold for a minute. It took her out of the moment, made her think about what God would think, looking down on the three of them writhing together in that dirty little motel room as she moaned out His name, and she waited for the weight of His condemnation to come down on her hard.

There was a tick of time, and then another, and Lyla figured God was staying silent on the subject because all she felt was loved.

A second later and she forgot about thoughts of condemnation completely. She began to wonder if Jason and Tim had been friends for so long that they’d started reading each other’s minds, because Tim pulled her back just as Jason moved forward. She found herself in Tim’s lap, her thighs draped over his, both of them perched on the edge of the bed. It creaked, protesting their combined weight with a little bit of a shiver that matched her own.

Tim pulled her dress over her head, the cotton scraping hard against her skin, and then his hand was between her legs. She gasped, both hands digging into his forearm so hard that her nails nearly broke the skin, because he was pressing hard against her clit in a way that made it impossible to tell whether or not it was pleasure she was feeling. His arms were around her like a cage, and she was squirming and wiggling against him in a half-hearted attempt at escape. His cock was hard inside his jeans. She could feel it pressing against her insistently, and she was starting to get a little wild, the too hard pressure of his fingers making her think that maybe what she was feeling was pleasure after all, because her heart was racing and her body was growing tight and she thought that maybe she was about to come.

She barely heard Jason’s voice, the sound muffled by the rush of blood in her ears. “Tim, man, come on.”

She did notice when Tim’s fingers disappeared. She still wasn’t sure if she was glad or mad about that when she felt the press of Jason’s tongue against her and everything inside her stopped abruptly, spinning around 180 degrees.

This was nothing but pleasure. Back when they’d been together, Jason had been on the receiving end of oral far more than he’d been on the giving end of it, and so he was a little untrained, a little messy, a little too all over the place for it to be exactly what Lyla needed, but she was so close that it didn’t really matter. She wound her fingers in his wet hair, holding his head still while she pressed up against his tongue in ways that fixed the things he was doing wrong. Behind her, she could feel one of Tim’s hands between them, struggling urgently with his belt buckle, while the other was wrapped hard around one of her thighs in a way that was sure to leave bruises.

It wasn’t until she looked down that she saw Jason’s forearms braced against Tim’s thighs, providing the balance he needed to keep himself upright. There was something about it – she knew it should be wrong, but her eyes lingered, thinking about what it would look like if she somehow vanished from in between them and there was nothing but Tim and Jason, alone in the dirty little motel room. She wondered if it would be as beautiful as that moment seemed to promise it would be.

That and the rasp of Tim’s zipper and his strangled groan of relief was all she needed.

She came with a loud cry, her head pressing back against Tim’s shoulder and her fingers tightening in Jason’s hair. It was long and good, the kind of orgasm that left her limp, the kind that wiped her mind clear of everything and left her blank. She liked the feeling; she sometimes wished she could live it longer, could pull it out when things got to be too much and she had to look at her dad standing on their front porch, begging and belligerent at the same time, or when she thought back to what things had been like with Jason before the accident and remembered that they’d never be that way again.

Tim had always been strong. There was something comforting about that, his undeniable physical strength, and so when he lifted her up off of him like a rag doll and put her down on the bed beside him, she didn’t feel the sense of panic that sometimes came with being overpowered. Instead it felt natural, like it must have felt to Jason when Tim reached down and hauled him up onto the bed with more muscle than grace. Jason landed with a bounce, and Lyla smiled at the sound of his delighted laughter even as she curled up on her elbows and began to climb out of her fog.

Her smile froze at the sight of Tim and Jason’s fingers fumbling together at the button on Jason’s jeans, and when they managed to get it undone and Tim stripped the cloth from Jason’s legs with a hard jerk even as Jason struggled to slip out of his shirt, her mouth went dry. It was one of those things she knew she should think was wrong – _again_ – but she couldn’t, not with Tim pulling his ripped-up tee up over his head, jeans sagging down halfway off of his hips, and Jason looking between the two of them like he didn’t know where to start.

“C’mere,” Tim murmured, one hand outstretched in Lyla’s direction. She took it and he pulled her to her feet with a jerk hard enough to send her flying into his chest, but before she could protest, he was kissing her. It was soft and sweet, the kind of kiss Tim had always given her, the kind that didn’t seem to match up with how she thought he should be. It was the kind of kiss that had always scared her, the kind that made her think that he might love her.

When she pulled back, a questioning look on her face, he seemed to realize that. The disconnection from her was visible, like a light flicking off behind his eyes, leaving nothing but his wry, bittersweet grin. And then he was strong again, putting his hands on her waist and slowly guiding her back until she bumped into Jason’s knees and almost lost her balance. His grip kept her upright as she found her balance and figured out what he wanted. When she did and her eyes flashed with recognition and understanding, he picked her up like she was nothing, setting her down so that she was on her knees facing him. Jason’s cock brushed teasingly against her inner thigh, his hands coming to her waist to replace Tim’s, and a moment later she shuddered as she sank down onto him. It had been a while and she was tight, the familiar burn of her body stretching to accommodate someone else suddenly new as she watched Tim’s face as he watched her.

His eyes were lidded and his lips parted as he drew in a breath of surprise along with her. Jason’s fingers tightened on her hips, prompting her to move, and so she flexed the muscles of her thighs and began a slow rhythm, working out the kinks until she was moving smoothly, her hands braced on his unfeeling knees for balance. From underneath her lashes, she watched as Tim shucked his jeans, one hand wrapping around his cock as he watched them together. He kept time with Lyla’s movements in a way that nearly drove her crazy until finally she said the same thing to him he’d said to her.

“C’mere.”

After a moment’s pause, he moved quickly until he was looming over her, and Lyla closed her eyes as she wrapped her lips around the tip of his cock. His moan was long and deep, and the feeling of his hand against the back of her head was a constant, steady pressure that was oddly comforting. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so forward, beckoning him to her like she had, but part of it probably had to do with the way he’d been standing there, half in the shadows and all alone, once again outside of the circle that had narrowed down to her and Jason. Only maybe, she realized a moment later, there was never going to be a way forward for all three of them. Jason’s fingers tightened on her hips as he made a sound of impatience behind them. He couldn’t move on his own in the way he needed to for this to work – she knew that, knew the way things had to be with Jason now, but her attention had shifted to Tim and the circle had moved her with, making Jason the one who was alone and frustrated.

When she pulled away from Tim, he was the one who gave out a groan of frustration. It almost made her want to stop, to pull away from both of them since nothing she could do would ever be enough. There was no pleasing everyone, not when she had to take away from one to give to the other.

“Hey,” Tim said softly, tilting her chin up. It was all he said, but his smirk was both a consolation and a challenge, enough to make her forget her moment of melancholy. She smirked herself, straightening and putting her hands on his chest for balance as she began to move again. Her eyes found his, his expression now serious and dark, and she found she couldn’t look away.

Her fingers curled into his chest, digging into the skin as her movements became more erratic, the increasing pleasure making it difficult for her to maintain anything like a rhythm. He realized, in that uncanny way he’d always had where he seemed to know when she needed him most, and she gasped as he took a step closer, his chest pressed firmly against hers. She whimpered when she felt his hands settle low on her hips, his fingers digging into her sides just above Jason’s; between the two of them, they directed her movements until both she and Jason were crying out and she could feel his body shaking beneath her and pumping inside of her. Desperate to share it, she clutched Tim so close to her that she imagined he could feel it too.

She was long past the point where she could support herself, and her head dropped down to Tim’s shoulder as she panted, chest heaving furiously as she tried to draw in air. When he kissed her this time, it was rough and messy, a hint of stubble coarse against her lower lip, and her fingers dug tightly into his hair in response. She had given up on caring about how this looked or what it meant.

She’d just wrapped her hand around his cock, more than aware that he was the only one of them who hadn’t yet come, when his hand found her wrist and pulled her away. She looked up at him, unaccountably hurt by the rejection, but the smirk was back and almost comforting in its familiarity. It didn’t take much urging for him to get her to lift up and turn around, but the way he jerked her hips back caught her by surprise and she dropped down onto Jason like a lead weight, nearly winding them both.

Jason was about to say something, the furrowing of his brows making her think he was going to complain, when Lyla gasped, the feel of Tim pushing into her catching her, somehow, off guard. It caught Jason off guard too, and he paused, mouth open, as Lyla dug her fingers into his shoulders and buried her face in his neck. She shivered as she felt Tim lean over her, his chest pressing into her back, and turned her head just in time to see his lips meet Jason’s. She caught the way Jason’s eyes widened in shock, the way he stayed still as if frozen for a long moment before surging up to kiss Tim back, and part of her wanted to stay as still as she could lest she break the spell between them. The other part struggled to keep from moving, the sight of the two boys kissing one another as if it were a fight they were both determined to win another one of those things she knew she was supposed to find wrong.

Lyla decided to give up on her notions of wrong and right, at least for the night. As far as she could tell, she’d received all the absolution she needed anyway.

They were both longer than she was, so for a while, Tim was able to fuck her and kiss Jason both. Lyla was sure she’d never felt closer to either of them than she did at that moment, pressed tightly between them, the sounds of their kisses providing a soundtrack that seemed to take everything she was feeling and amplify it tenfold. And it was _their_ moment, she realized, the three of them finally managing to somehow make the circle whole again.

Whole, at least, for a precious little while.

It had to end. She knew that, and soon she felt it in the urgency of Tim’s movements. The time came when he couldn’t have them both any more, when he had to pull away to focus on her, though oddly enough, Lyla felt it as a loss. She tried to stem the feeling by pressing her lips to Jason’s and it helped some. She thought she could taste Tim on him, and it was kind of like they were a circle again – nowhere they started, nowhere they ended – but it wasn’t long before there was a sense of inevitability about things. Tim was driving into her with purpose, and that plus the friction where her body met Jason’s was combining to overtake her again. She tried to watch Jason, tried to connect with him the same way she had Tim when things had been reversed, but she didn’t have the energy. Instead she pressed her face into his neck and wrapped her arms around him so that she was cradling his head and muffled her screams against his skin.

A minute later and Tim’s own yelp of satisfaction was loud and sharp. Exhausted, he slumped down on top of them, creating a precarious pile for a moment until they managed to topple over and rearrange themselves into something more comfortable. Tim wrapped his arm around Lyla from the back and Jason did the same from the front and she could feel the places where their hands got trapped, with the palms pressed against her belly and the backs against one another’s abdomens, and knowing that they could each feel a little bit of one another made her happy.

******

The next day, the mood in the truck was less tense than it ought to be. It was like there was some kind of common understanding. No one had muttered any half-hearted excuses about how drunk they’d all been the night before in an attempt to whitewash what had happened right out of their memories. No one had protested angrily that it couldn’t happen again, or that word of what had happened had better stay between the three of them or else.

No, they’d woken up that morning plastered together in a room that stank of stale sweat, sex, tequila and beer. They’d had their moment of awkwardness, when everybody was naked and no one knew what to do. And then Tim had rolled away, finding his jeans crumpled on the floor, and he’d pulled them on with a nonchalant ease that suggested that these kinds of things could be handled with the same apathetic calm that he used to handle everything else.

“We should go back to our room. Let you get ready,” he’d said, running a hand through his tangled hair to push it off of his face. His jaw had been shadowed with stubble and there had been dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. For once, instead of looking away, Lyla had let herself focus on him, on the lean, ripped lines of his torso and the way the veins in his arms stood out starkly, a testament to what was sure to be dehydration. He was still everything he’d always been, a mix of frustratingly simple boy and mysteriously complex man, and though nothing that had happened the night before had changed that, she’d felt a kind of peace with it.

“Yeah,” she’d said, her voice a hoarse croak. It had reminded her how thirsty she was and kicked into gear the headache she’d been expecting, and so she’d flopped down onto the bed with a tired groan, not quite sure she was going to be able to persuade herself to leave it any time soon.

Jason’s voice had been tired, too, and a hint shy. “So I guess we’ll see you in a little while.”

“Yeah,” she’d said again, still out of things to say.

“Come on, Six,” Tim had said, something in his smile rueful as he pushed Jason’s chair to the edge of the bed, watching as the other boy struggled into it on his own. “Let’s get out of here.”

And they had, leaving Lyla there with the smell of them burned into the sheets. So she’d wallowed for a little while, had rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and took a deep breath when she thought about what had happened the night before, but there was nothing for it other than to get up, shower, and get back on the road back to Dillon.

They’d had tacos from breakfast, procured by Tim from some roadside stand. The air conditioning had been cranked up in the cab of the truck and the radio was turned down low, leaving an almost sub-audible buzz of frenetic Spanish in the background. Lyla ignored the parts of her that were sore, her head and other, unmentionable places, and let her thoughts drift. She thought about praying again, about maybe asking for forgiveness, but from what she knew of that, for it to work, she had to mean it.

They’d made it nearly to the border when the words finally came.

“I know this isn’t going to change anything, but I want to say it anyway. You don’t have to say anything back. Maybe it’d be better if you don’t say anything back.” The words had started in a jumble, and so she paused, taking in a deep, calming breath, and tried to work them into a semblance of order. “When we get back to Dillon, everything’s going to be the same, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to forget. I meant what happened last night. The two of you are my best friends, and I love you. I love you both, and you love one another, and that’s the thing we should really remember.”

She stopped abruptly, the words hanging out there like a thought without finish. It was all she’d managed to cobble together and, really, all she’d wanted to say anyway, and even as she searched for some way to sum things up, to find closure for all of them so that this moment would continue to exist without tension and bitterness, her mind reset itself to blank.

After a minute, she began to think she hadn’t spoken at all. Tim and Jason were still sitting there, eyes focused on the road ahead of them with unwavering concentration, and it occurred to her that she might be losing her mind.

“Didn’t you hear me?” she asked finally, tone edged with frustration.

She wanted to slap the smug smile off Tim’s face the second he spoke. “Yeah, Garrity, we heard you. What you’re saying is, all we need is love, is that it?”

Her nails curled into her palms, because it was just like him to make fun of anything real; here he was, returning back to the status quo where Tim Riggins was sometimes sensitive but mostly an asshole, and she wasn’t sure she could take it anymore. She knew better. Part of her had always known better, but now she had first-hand knowledge. She’d seen him scared. She’d seen him ask for help. She’d seen him desperate, and now that she had, she was going to hold him accountable for it.

Before she could tell him any of that, though, Jason beat her to it.

“I’m hurt, Riggins, that you would even try to insinuate that I’m not special.” He said it with the tone of teasing that had always existed between them, the one that seemed to be the secret language they spoke when they couldn’t figure out how to say what they wanted to say any other way. In the past, it had always left Lyla feeling like an outsider, like the clueless observer of a joke she just didn’t get.

Now, things were different.

It took a minute for Tim to respond. “You think I’d drag my ass to Mexico for anybody else, Six?” he finally asked, a lightness to his drawl that answered Jason’s and calmed the part of Lyla that had been starting to struggle.

When she heard the same thing in Jason’s voice echoed back again, that circular rhythm now set between them, the combined warmth spread through her chest. “You think I’d ask anyone else to come with me, Riggins?”

Relieved, she turned her face skyward again, searching for anger or condemnation just like she had the night before.

All she felt was loved.


End file.
